The Lemon Tree Hotel

by Rosanna Ley

  ‘Did you see him before he left?’

  Fortunately, Chiara had her back to Alonzo as he asked this question. Yes, I saw him. Though she didn’t say this. Instead, she plunged the plates into a bowlful of hot water she’d just run. She had seen him, and she had slept with him – all night. He had comforted her and he had loved her. Oh, how he had loved her. And she had loved him back – and meant it.

  After her conversation with Elene early this morning, after she had showered and got dressed and carefully made up her face to hide the lingering bruise on her cheek, Chiara had made her way to Dante’s room with a heavy heart. She knocked lightly and he came to the door.

  ‘That was quick.’ He drew her inside. ‘I must have underestimated my powers.’ Then he saw her face. ‘What is it, cara? Is he back already? What’s happened?’

  ‘No. It’s not Alonzo.’

  ‘So?’ But she could see that already, he had guessed.

  ‘You must leave The Lemon Tree Hotel, my love,’ she said.

  ‘And you?’ He lifted her chin.

  ‘I must stay.’

  He let out a deep sigh and swore softly. ‘What has changed?’

  Nothing, she thought, and everything. She told him how Elene had been standing in the shadows of the corridor when Chiara had left his room that morning. She told him of their conversation.

  Already, he was shaking his head. Already he was moving away from her, standing by the window looking out on to the olive grove, a bitter reminder of that other time.

  ‘You don’t know how hard this is for me.’ Chiara spoke softly. She couldn’t see his face, but his back was stiff and unyielding. She was heartbroken. But what else could she do?

  ‘She is your daughter, yes,’ Dante said, ‘but she is also an adult woman with a husband of her own. Give her time and she will understand her mother’s choices.’

  ‘And what would we do?’ For they had not even discussed this. She came up to where he was standing at the window. His eyes flickered to her and then away. ‘Would I leave the hotel and my family and come to England with you? Would you leave your business in England and come to live in Vernazza with me?’

  He spread his hands. She knew that he had no answers. ‘We could at least talk about it, cara.’

  Outside, the morning sunlight gleamed on the narrow grey-green leaves of the olive trees. The fruit was ripening. Soon there would be another harvest. ‘I can’t do it, Dante,’ she said. It wasn’t even Alonzo. ‘My family still needs me.’ Elene still needed her – she had made that plain. And The Lemon Tree Hotel still needed her too. Dante had managed perfectly well without her all these years, but her family could not. Alonzo would always go his own way, and she knew now more than ever that any love between them had died. But they still shared a daughter. Elene was more vulnerable than she had ever realised. Chiara must focus now on repairing the damage she had already done – this was her chance, her duty.

  ‘Very well.’ And to her horror his face seemed to close up to her, just as it had done forty years before.

  She caught at his arm, wanting him to understand. ‘Sometimes, Dante, it is impossible to choose love.’

  ‘So, it seems.’ He pulled away from her. She didn’t think that she could bear it.

  ‘Do you understand, Dante?’ she begged him. ‘Can you forgive me?’

  He turned back, his dark eyes at once both wistful and calm. ‘I understand that your hotel and your family are tying you down, Chiara,’ he said. ‘I understand that you will never be free to live your own life.’

  She looked down. She knew that he was right.

  ‘And there is nothing to forgive you for.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Dante—’

  ‘You need not worry.’ And his voice grew hard. ‘For I tell you this – I will not come back for you again.’

  *

  Chiara turned around to face her husband. His eyes narrowed as he waited for her reply. ‘Well?’

  She thought of Elene and what she had promised. The truth would help no one. ‘How could I see him?’ she demanded – regally, she hoped. ‘After what you said? After what you did?’ Instinctively, she put a hand to her face, to the mark of his slap. ‘Believe me, Alonzo, I did not want to see a soul.’

  She had not been able to watch Dante leave. She had asked Marco to take over on reception, and she had waited in her room upstairs. And then she had run to the window and seen him at the moment he walked away. He had not looked around, and she had not expected him to. She had longed to run after him. She wanted to catch his arm and tell him it was a mistake, and she wanted to see his eyes light up as she told him that they could be together, that she agreed – somehow, they would find a way. It was like the night in the olive grove all over again. The same old love, the same old heartbreak.

  Then she thought of Elene – poor Elene, who wore the armour of her kitchen whites to hide her vulnerability and her fears. Would Elene tell her father what she had seen? Would she tell him that her mother had spent the night with Dante Rossi? She didn’t think so. Why would she, when she was so desperate for her parents to stay together?

  ‘Bene.’ Alonzo nodded with satisfaction – the satisfaction of a bully who has been obeyed, she found herself thinking. ‘The mark on your face – it has faded.’

  Chiara remained silent, chin held high. She almost didn’t want it to fade. She almost wanted to show the world what he was. And what about what she was – a woman who had betrayed her husband? A woman who had made love with another man? She would have to carry the guilt of that for ever.

  Alonzo got to his feet and approached her. She tried not to wince. He lifted her chin still higher with his forefingers so that her face was in the light. ‘Sì, it is almost gone.’ He didn’t take his hand away.

  Chiara met his scrutiny without flinching. She thought of Dante’s words to her last night. He will do it again, he had said. Was he right? Possibly. And there was no way she was going to play victim in a marriage of domination – whatever she might have done to deserve it. ‘You know it is over between us, Alonzo?’ She kept her gaze strong, she refused to let her voice shake. He must know that she was in control of this situation. Otherwise . . .

  ‘Over?’ He frowned, stared at her some more, narrowed his eyes again. ‘What are you talking about? Our marriage?’ And for the first time she heard his voice falter.

  ‘Not our marriage, no.’ She couldn’t do that to Elene. She had promised.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Our intimacy.’

  He laughed as he let go of her face at last. ‘Not that there was much of that,’ he said.

  Chiara bowed her head and looked up again. ‘Not that there was much of that,’ she agreed, still watching him.

  She could see him trying to work it out. What did she mean exactly, and how would it affect him? What could he do to regain the upper hand? Should he hit her again – maybe he also considered that. She would just have to hope that he decided against it. ‘Or – what?’ he said.

  Chiara had her answer ready. ‘Or we separate,’ she said clearly. He didn’t need to know what was holding her to him – that promise to Elene. It was a bluff, but she could carry it off; she’d done it before.

  Alonzo frowned. ‘You’d leave the hotel?’

  What was he thinking? ‘You would leave the hotel,’ she corrected. ‘Obviously I would stay. I work here. I own the hotel.’ She didn’t think she’d gone too far. She had to show strength – that was imperative.

  ‘Separate beds, my love?’ he sneered. ‘Is that what you’re proposing?’

  ‘We have a spare room.’ She hardly need point out how frequently he was not here.

  ‘People will know,’ he muttered.

  Maids, he meant. The housekeeper. The employees who came in and cleaned. She shrugged. ‘I can make the bed in the spare room when you have stayed here, if that’s the only thing bothering you.’ She didn’t trouble to hide her disdain. This wasn’t about whether or not Alonzo lost face i
n front of the employees of the hotel, for God’s sake. This was about somehow managing to be true to herself, to Dante, and yet also keep her promise. She didn’t think she could bear to touch this man, or worse, for him to touch her. Not now. Alonzo had assumed it was because he had hit her. He didn’t need to know the rest of the reason why.

  He returned to the table to pour more wine. ‘And the rest of our marriage?’

  What else was there, she wondered. For most of her life she had been in a loveless marriage. She didn’t yet know if this new state of affairs would be better – or worse.

  ‘Will be as before,’ she said. ‘For the sake of appearances.’ And for the sake of Elene. Dante’s return had changed her life. But she would not admit that to anyone.

  CHAPTER 21

  Elene

  Elene was in the kitchen doing the prep for her salsa di noci. She would serve it with trenette, a narrow, flat pasta similar to linguine but made from wholewheat flour; in Liguria they valued the variety of their pasta and they preferred to be precise. She was just reaching for her pestle and mortar when Silvio appeared at the back door.

  ‘Ciao,’ he said.

  ‘Ciao.’ Elene glanced across at her husband and caught his worried look a microsecond before he changed it to a smile. She sighed. ‘Hungry?’

  Silvio had worn this worried look ever since the morning when Elene had virtually caught her mother emerging from Dante Rossi’s bedroom. Would he always be sad or worried? Was that the best she could do for this man? She closed her eyes for a moment, remembered how she had felt as she waited in the shadows of that corridor. Her mother was not in her apartment, had not been there all night. Elene had hardly slept for thinking about it. It was almost impossible to imagine – but there was only one place she could be . . .

  Elene watched her husband as he pulled off his boots. She had been so frightened at that moment, though she couldn’t say exactly why – pulled into some old childhood fear she couldn’t even name. Was it a fear of her parents’ impending separation? It was true that they had always spent more time apart than together, true that – now she came to think of it – they were rarely openly affectionate with one another. But they were her parents nonetheless, and parents came as one unit as far as she was concerned. Elene snipped a bulb of garlic from the strand hanging from a hook. It had been wrong perhaps to give in to it. Was it a fear of how any separation might affect her and the hotel? Was it a fear of the unknown? Or was it something deeper – was it a feeling that everything, her whole world, was somehow falling apart?

  Elene determinedly pushed these thoughts away. She pressed hard on the garlic with the bridge of her hand and the cloves cracked and separated. Silvio winced. Elene didn’t want to analyse how she felt – she couldn’t. But she had let down the barriers. She had – unusually for her, apart from when she was in her kitchen – acted on instinct. She only knew that when she saw that ugly mark of violence on her mother’s face . . . she had felt the strangest surge of love and protection mixed with that fear of the unknown. She had been determined to save her – and Papà too.

  ‘Am I not always half-starved?’ Silvio grinned and grabbed a cornetto from the tray on the counter.

  Expertly, Elene peeled the sticky garlic cloves with a minimum of neat movements and without a knife – it was something that every chef learned at the start of his or her career. ‘Help yourself,’ she murmured, but not unkindly.

  She didn’t even want to know the full story of what had happened between her mother and Rossi – indeed, something inside her had blocked off that need to know and replaced it with a desire simply to sweep it out of sight. She only knew that before Dante Rossi had come to The Lemon Tree Hotel, things had been fine (though perhaps ‘fine’ wasn’t quite the word; she was aware that her mother wasn’t truly happy, and obviously the relationship between Elene and her mother was strained, had always been strained, but . . .) and that after Dante Rossi arrived, everything had gone terribly wrong.

  Elene removed the chunks of bread that had been soaking in milk, ready to combine with the walnuts, parmesan cheese, marjoram, and seasonings. Perhaps she shouldn’t have called her father when she saw her mother reach up to him with that intimate gesture – she knew that Silvio thought she shouldn’t have – but now it was done. Dante Rossi had left the hotel, and now hopefully they could all go back to normal.

  The trouble was though, that they had not. She still remembered the feel of her mother stroking her hair – it had been so long since Mamma had held her that way . . . Elene sniffed. She wanted her to do it again – and at the same time she thought that she would do anything to stop her. She grated the parmesan into a wide bowl, sniffing the strong flavour as she did so. But now her mother looked unbearably sad, her father looked grim and angry, and the atmosphere between her parents was one of a chilly politeness that made Elene shiver inside. What had she done? Allora, things could only get better – she hoped.

  ‘And how are you, my love?’ Silvio asked.

  ‘Busy.’ Elene began to add her garlic. It was a delicate job. It had to be worked towards a paste, but it was necessary to stop just short – for it must not be too smooth. Food processors and electric blenders were all very fine and dandy, but for this job, a pestle and mortar was better. It allowed things to be more gradual, for the chef to blend at a slow rate and to catch the perfect point.

  After the confrontation with her mother, all Elene had wanted to do was run to the kitchen – that was always her first instinct when things went wrong in her world. But she could hardly take charge of la cucina in the tearful, red-eyed and blotchy state she was in, and so she swiftly returned to their rooms and of course it was early, and Silvio was there, getting washed and ready for his day and probably wondering where on earth his wife was.

  ‘What is it?’ he had demanded, fists clenched as if he were ready to go out and punch whatever had caused her distress.

  Despite everything, Elene had to smile. She’d told him what had happened with her mother, and then she’d cried some more. When she was done, she’d washed her face, re-applied her make-up, brushed her hair, and coiled it neatly into the chignon she wore in the kitchen. That efficient chignon symbolised her no-nonsense working mantra – with that, she put the emotion behind her and became a focused and capable chef once more.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be getting to work?’ she’d asked Silvio, who was still hovering, looking both sad and worried at the same time.

  ‘But what are you going to do?’

  ‘Do?’ Elene checked her face in the mirror. No one would know she had been weeping for Italy.

  ‘Are you going to tell your father?’ Silvio’s eyes were wide. It almost looked as if he was frightened too.

  ‘No.’ Elene had known that from the moment she’d walked into her mother’s arms, even before Mamma had promised that she would not leave The Lemon Tree Hotel. This time, she would not betray her. Her father was a proud man, and Elene wanted to keep them together, not prise them apart.

  ‘Then—’

  Elene put a finger to her husband’s lips. ‘I don’t want to talk about this again. Per favore.’

  Silvio frowned. ‘But—’

  ‘I mean that, Silvio.’ She had opened the door of their room, ready now to face anything. She didn’t need reminders, she didn’t want this kind of emotion that threatened her working practice. It had been dealt with. And that was enough.

  ‘What you did . . .’ He wasn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer.

  ‘You think it was selfish?’ She turned to face him.

  ‘Yes.’

  Of course, he was right. Elene was an adult woman and old enough to allow her mother to lead her own life, to deal with her mother’s decisions. Only at that moment in her parents’ rooms she hadn’t felt it.

  ‘I know what you wanted though.’ And there was a certain wisdom in Silvio’s eyes that Elene wasn’t sure she had seen there before.

  ‘Oh?’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘And wha
t did I want?’

  ‘You wanted to make your mother choose.’

  *

  ‘I won’t disturb you if you’re busy,’ Silvio said now. Even so, while Elene had been adding the garlic, he had helped himself to coffee, eaten another three cornetti, passed the time of day with Raphael, who was on the other side of the kitchen preparing vegetables, and he was now peering into Elene’s mortar as if her salsa di noci could somehow tell him the meaning of life. It was good. It was an underestimated sauce that was only fully appreciated in the tasting. But it wasn’t that good.

  So – she had made her mother choose. Why then, didn’t she have more sense of satisfaction, since her mother had – against the odds – chosen Elene?

  She began to mix in some of their best and purest olive oil from last year’s harvest, a teaspoon at a time, grinding and smoothing as she went. The oil was so special to their cuisine. Homer had called it liquid gold – that was true enough. The rhythmic nature of these tasks she found soothing – especially when everything else at The Lemon Tree seemed so fraught. Marcello himself had taught her how to make this sauce – Elene had hardly changed a thing, though she had departed slightly from Marcello’s purist Ligurian method by adding a little cream; in her opinion the walnut sauce was even more delicious that way.

  ‘What are you up to this morning anyway?’ she asked Silvio. She was conscious that he was lingering.

  ‘Laying down some gravel outside the front door.’ He went to take another cornetto from the tray and she slapped his hand.

  ‘Basta, Silvio! Too many pastries are no good for your waistline. I will do you some lunch soon.’

  He shrugged and grinned. Sometimes, Silvio looked just like a little boy. Sometimes, he made Elene wish that they had been blessed with another child, a boy, a miniature version of her Silvio, a dear son who would give all his love to his mamma. She smiled grimly. As if . . .